Homer Becomes Omar

geekster writes "With Omar as Homer, and Badr substituted for Bart, The Simpsons is now playing on Arab television. But in order not to risk offending an Arab audience, the characters in Al Shamshoon, as the show is now called, have modified some of their most distinguishable traits." And you thought internationalization was hard for software!

Comments

The show will need local humor appeal

[It doesn't come easy]

Taking Homer and stripping out all of the Americanisms isn't going to make it funny to people with a mideast cultural sense of humor (it would probably be funnier if they just left the Americanisms in). Homer is a success in America because we are laughing at ourselves. I would bet Omar could be as much of a success if the show could present the same kind of local irreverent humor about life there like it does for life in the US.

Changing Homer?

[SillyNickName4me]

Even more damning was the response of Al Jean, executive producer of The Simpsons. He said: "If Homer doesn't drink and eat bacon and generally act like a pig, which I guess is also against Islam, then it's not Homer."

Sums it up quite nicely I think.. not having seen this of course.

Re:My karma can stand it

[drsquare]

Of course, the Simpsons never makes fun of Christians or conservatives.

ITP I fix the typo from the parent post:

[RLiegh]

Let me ask you, in Saudi Arabia how likely is it to put forth atheistic and/or anti-muslim views and have them broadcast...and if, by some miracle you were able to; what would happen to you?

Re:My karma can stand it

[Krach42]

Look, the issue isn't that we're emasculating our own content. But you can't tell me that we're not pandering to christian values when... well, this is too long to put in a dependant clause, I explain.

Watch some Anime, originals from Japan. There are shows that are marketed to children, or young adults, or at least air during such hours that American families usually allow their children to watch TV. These shows have STRONG explicit words in them occationally, and nudity.

So, what do we do in America? Well, first we change the explicit words so that when say, an actor says "Chikushou" = very strong curse word, along the lines of "fucking christ!", or "kuso" = literally, "shit", we change these words to be "darn" or "dangit". I mean, we change the words coming out of the characters mouth from "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THAT HURT!" to "OUCH! Hey man, that hurt!"

Next up is how to deal with nudity. Well, we have good examples of these... we just digitally insert bikinis on to them. There you go, all happy christian-safe now.

So, yes, the US does censor content coming from foreign countries, the same as this Al-Shamshoons does in Arabia.